Cook, John Parsons, -1855; Palmer, William, 1824-1856 -- Trials, litigation, etc.; Trials (Murder) -- England -- London
power and determine the blood to the head, as joy, anger, religious
enthusiasm, excessive desire, &c., or those which greatly depress the
nervous influence, as well as diminish and derange the actions of the
heart, as fear, terror, anxiety, sadness, distressing intelligence,
frightful dreams, &c., the syphilitic poison and repulsion of gout or
rheumatism.”
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Now, do you believe that if Dr. Taylor had read that before he went to
the inquest he would have dared to say that this man died of strychnia
poison? Is there one single symptom in the statement made in the
depositions of Elizabeth Mills and Mr. Jones which may not be classed
under one of the varieties of the degrees of convulsions which Dr.
Copland describes? Now, it is not for me to suggest a theory, but the
gentlemen whom I shall call before you, men of the highest eminence in
their profession, not mere surgeons of hospitals who never see anything
hardly except it is of that nature, that is, of the traumatic
kind--gentlemen, do not suppose that I should be capable of speaking
disrespectfully of Sir Benjamin Brodie, or of any of the gentlemen
called except in terms of the highest respect; but they are surgeons of
hospitals, and obtain a certain experience as to those misfortunes under
which, through violence, the human frame suffers; who have not so much
opportunity of witnessing and of knowing the symptoms of the class of
convulsions which constantly attack people in their own residences in
the dead of the night--those convulsions which heads of families and
brothers and sisters are most anxious to conceal from anybody but the
medical man--those convulsions, the known existence of which deprives a
young woman of the hope, or a young man of the hope, of marriage. It is
the men who have that sort of experience--the general practitioners--men
who enjoy the entire confidence of numerous families, and have the
opportunity of visiting, in the way of their profession, the poor at
their lowly dwellings, suffering under sudden convulsions when affected
by serious disease--those are the men that we want to tell us about
convulsions. Do not let me mislead you for a moment--the evidence I have
read to you is not the whole of the evidence of Elizabeth Mills. There
is her evidence, differing in some material particulars from the
evidence given by her before the coroner. As to Mr. Jones, the evidence
does not so much differ, though there may be some particulars in which
there is a difference--and there is one remarkable one. He said in his
depositions, “The body was resting on its head and its heels”; but in
his evidence he says, “It was so bent that if it had been turned on its
back, it would, or might, have rested on its head and its heels”--that
is, if it did not rest on the back; but he in substance says it did. Mr.
Bamford says he found it resting on its head, its back, and its heels,
thereby excluding the supposition that a part of the body was not
supported by the back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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